—
Jordan Mayes drove alone through the gates of Alexandria Eight. He wasn’t supposed to go anywhere without his bodyguards, but he’d slipped out without letting the security logistics office know, and he’d taken his own car, which had been parked in the lot at Langley for the past week.
Here at the safe house he stopped halfway up the driveway, showed his credos to the guard force positioned there, and then continued on to the front door. He climbed out of his car, pulled out a briefcase, and walked into the building. In the large great hall he was checked and wanded and his briefcase was opened and looked through, and then he walked alone up to the second-floor south wing doorway.
He crossed the wide and high south wing hall into the large conference room, made a right, and entered the narrow hallway there. This led him past the bathroom on his left, and then, also on his left, the stairs up to the attic. Beyond this Mayes found DeRenzi and two other security officers standing in the open doorway to Denny’s office. The men parted with a nod to let the second-in-command of the National Clandestine Service through, and then Mayes found Denny sitting at a table by the window and working on a laptop.
Denny looked up. “What is it?”
Mayes said nothing.
Carmichael looked to the security team. “DeRenzi. Step out.”
“Yes, sir.” The three men left and shut the door behind them.
“Talk.”
Mayes walked over to the table, and he stood over Carmichael. “Your attempts to play this entire hand so close to your vest that even I don’t know what you are doing have failed you, Denny.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning this.” Mayes opened his briefcase, took out an iPad, turned it on, and offered it to Denny. Confused, Carmichael took it.
Carmichael saw a film waiting to run, so he tapped the “play” icon with the tip of his finger.
It was the video Andy Shoal had obtained from the woman working in the sandwich shop that morning.
Carmichael watched the entire video without comment and without emotion. When it was over, he simply handed the device back.
“Where did you get it?”
“Out of the e-mail account of Andrew Shoal, the Washington Post reporter. It came from an account belonging to a woman who works at a fast-food restaurant in Dupont Circle. So far Shoal hasn’t sent it anywhere else. I had the tech alter the coding of the video, corrupt it, which just means if he tries to send it now it won’t play. But he’s seen it, he obviously gave some import to what he saw there, and the woman who recorded it presumably still has it on her mobile device.”
Carmichael looked out the window. “What do you think you see there, Mayes?”
Mayes couldn’t believe the question. “Obviously, Denny, it shows a bunch of wounded cops who I seriously doubt are cops. One of these men looks like he probably died within minutes. Nothing like this was reported by Metro D.C. If this gets out, the press will—”
Carmichael shouted, tension in his voice, “It won’t get out!”
“Tell me what is going on, Denny.”
The older man rubbed his face in his hands a moment. After some delay he nodded, looked back to Mayes, and softly said a name.
“Al-Kazaz.”
Mayes cocked his head. “The Saudi intel chief? I know you are old acquaintances. What does this have to do with him? These are his men?”
“You might say, for purposes of the Violator operation . . . these are my men.”
Jordan Mayes started to sit down in a chair at the table, but it was as if his knees gave out suddenly near the end of the movement. He dropped roughly into the chair.
“Mother of God.”
—
Over the next thirty minutes, Denny Carmichael told Jordan Mayes everything about Gentry and the Saudi relationship to him.
Not just their service in the Violator hunt—but everything.
When Carmichael finished, his second-in-command looked out the window to the southwest. A thick bank of clouds grew low, gray, and ominous, approaching like a wall closing in on Washington, D.C. After a moment Mayes just said, “Jesus Christ, Denny.”
Carmichael kept his eyes on Mayes’s face. “Of course, you see the problem here.”
Mayes nodded distractedly. Then, “Of course I do. Why didn’t you—”
Carmichael interrupted. “Anything I did or did not do is all water under the bridge now, isn’t it? Could I have managed this better from the beginning? Absolutely. I acknowledge that. But you see I had to make a series of on-the-fly critical decisions. Some I got right. A great many, as a matter of fact, but they have been eclipsed in importance by the very few decisions I got wrong.”
He shrugged. “And here we are today. You are now in the fold, and I need to know that I can count on you for the good of the future of this Agency.”
Mayes finally looked away from the window and towards his superior. “You just told me all this so I would know the stakes.”